The IT Nerd

The interior of this Dodge Grand Caravan Crew Plus is an interesting mix of items that allows you to customize the minivan to suit whatever need you have. I’ll start from the front and work backwards. Here’s what the driver gets to see:

The gauge cluster is bright and easy to read. The brightness is also adjustable which is handy because my wife found it to be too bright. The center part of the cluster is also customizable to show different types of info such as fuel economy or turn by turn directions. Now there’s the center stack:

Again, the screen is easy to read. Press the “open/close” button on the top left corner of the screen and you get this:

That’s a CD/DVD player. If that’s not enough, you get a second DVD player near the bottom of the center stack:

You’ll also note that the climate controls just above the DVD are easy to access as well. Further to the right are not one but two glove boxes:

Moving backwards, there’s a really amazing center console. Besides having two cupholders which fits all the travel mugs that my wife and I threw at it, there’s two drawers in it:

There’s one with two power outlets in it and there’s also this one as well:

Plus from the second row is a drawer that can fit your drinks or a lot of stuff you want to throw at it. For example, it was a great for my wife’s purse:

Speaking of cupholders, there are lots of them in the second:

And third rows:

Sweet. Also in the back on the left hand side are hook ups for your XBox360 or PlayStation 3:

I’ll be covering these in more detail later in this review along with the rest of the electronics.

Now, one of the advantages of the Dodge Grand Caravan Crew Plus is that it can carry lots of stuff or people. It will seat seven people. But if you don’t need those seats, you can fold them flat into the floor to create a flat surface to load your latest purchases from Home Depot. The feature is called Stow N’ Go and it works exceptionally well. Here’s how the second row seats go down. After you move the frond driver’s seat forward and remove the floor mat, you have to flip up this panel:

Next you have to pull a lever that flips the seat into this position:

You can the push the seat into the floor like this:

Finally, you can put the cover down:

It’s extremely easy and anyone can do it. As a bonus, when you have the seats up you can use the space in the floor to hide your valuables. Nice!

Now there’s the third row seating. It’s power operated and it has some tricks that makes it stand out from the rest of the crowd. Here’s a video that illustrates those tricks:

Two notes. First, the left and the right headsets flip down via a pull tab. But the middle one doesn’t. Why? Second, the middle seatbelt has to be removed for the seats to be flipped down. That requires a sharp object like a key to remove it. Not a deal breaker, but it should be noted.

One note about the surfaces, the seating is leather. There’s a mix of hard plastics and soft materials everywhere else. For example, the dash is a hard plastic but the door panels are a mix of soft touch materials and hard plastics. It all seems well put together.

Gripes? The one thing that my wife points out is that the driver and passenger seats are power adjustable seats. But it doesn’t seem that the driver seat has the ability to memorize settings so that multiple drivers don’t have to reset the seat to the way they like it? That would be a welcome feature for those who have households where two or more people drive this vehicle.

What’s the bottom line? This isn’t your average vehicle. At least, not thus far.

The next part of this review will deal with the drive quality of the Grand Caravan. Stay tuned.

This entry was posted on December 6, 2012 at 8:05 am and is filed under Products with tags Dodge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.